Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags: The Tri-State Crematory

Episode Date: March 19, 2022

Twenty years ago, the discovery of a human skull would reveal one of Georgia’s most gruesome and bizarre crimes. More than 300 decomposing bodies were found discarded on the grounds of the Tri-State Crematory. Located in the mountains of northwest Georgia, the facility serviced funeral homes in Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama. An investigation revealed the abused could have been going on as long as the mid-1990's. The owenr, Ray Brent Marsh, ultimately served 13 years in prison for multiple charges including abusing a corpse, burial service-related fraud and theft by deception. Even now, two decades later, not all of the remains have been identified. Today on Body Bags, forensics expert and former death scene investigator Joseph Scott Morgan reveals what it's like to work such a horrific case. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. There's something about wintertime in the deep south. It can be cool outside, but still the sun warms your face. On February the 15th, 2002, a lady was out walking her dog along a country lane in rural Georgia. One of those places that's got pine trees on either side of the road, beautiful cobalt blue skies above her. Not a care in the world. Now she's walking along with her dog enjoying the perfect day. She looks over to her right

and she notices something glinting in the sun. It's a human skull, bleached white. Lord only knows how long it had been there. That discovery by that woman led to one of the most horrific events in the history of the state of Georgia. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. With me today is my good friend, Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, have you ever heard about anything like this in your entire life? And I'm talking about the tri-state crematory. No, Joe, I have not. It has been, as you said, 20 years since this gruesome discovery was made. In February of 2002, nearly 350 decomposing bodies were found on the property

of a crematorium in Noble, Georgia, that is up in the mountains of North Georgia, up above Rome. It's a very small town, and the tri-state crematorium had been in business since the early 70s, and it served a number of funeral homes in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. What was found was instead of performing services that he was hired to do, the owner, Ray Brent Marsh, would not perform the cremation services, but rather he just stacked bodies and stored the bodies there on the property. Families were given concrete in the urns they requested. They did not receive the remains of their family and loved ones. And I have so

many questions for you, Joe, but what I want to start off with is talking about cremation. Most people really don't understand it other than to know that bodies are burned. So what is cremation and how are bodies prepared to be cremated? Yeah, Jackie, you know, the public at large has no interest in it. Well, let me rephrase that. The public at large doesn't want to know anything about it because it's absolutely gruesome when you begin to talk about it. You know, you think about the total and complete envelopment of the human remain to get it rendered down into ash, all that's left behind. And, you know, you take a body and after it's been rendered down, you can put it into an urn and many people have them in their homes.

But how do you get to that point? And let me dispel one thing right up front. Not every funeral home has a crematory. This is a very specific operation. As a matter of fact, you have to meet very stringent EPA standards in order to operate one, own and operate one. And so what happens in the funeral industry is that you will have a regular funeral home and they will essentially subcontract with a crematory that will perform this function.

Now, once these bodies are received at the crematory, they're prepared simply by placing the body on essentially a conveyor belt, and they're conveyed into this giant crematory, which, you know, for lack of a better term, it's a huge oven is essentially what it is. Now, what makes it so effective is that it is completely sealed. All right. And when it's sealed within this environment, there are these little gas jets that are positioned all around the interior of this thing. And what happens is it's supplied by natural gas, like a gas line that's running into the crematory. This thing is initiated and it has to remain sustained at a temperature of about 1700 to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit for a protracted period of time. Now, understand that the length of time that a cremation takes is many times totally and completely dependent

upon the size of the body. Let's just be very frank here. If you've got a very small person, it's not going to take as long as it would be for somebody that is, say, very, very large. So there is some skill involved in this. Now, once the body is essentially rendered down in the crematory, it is belt-fed out of the oven itself, and it goes through an auger, if you will. Just imagine a great turning screw.

And this will make the – what it does is it actually reduces the larger burned pieces down to a particulate remain, which is powdered almost. And, you know, because you have to understand that, for instance, when you're talking about bone, bone is not resilient as resilient as teeth, for instance. Teeth are not bone. Teeth will survive a cremation many times. So the idea is to try to render it down as far as you possibly can. And to the untrained eye, most people would not be able to discern between, say, something that they're told is a cremaine, and that's the term that's actually used, like remains.

If a body has been cremated, they're referred to as cremains, that and concrete dust, which in the case of Ray Brent Marsh, he was actually taking concrete dust and filling urns with them and giving this back to families. Now, you know, in addition to that, it is stated that he would burn wood periodically to kind of render it down as well to give it kind of a charred appearance. And he would commingle, mix that with this concrete dust, seal it up and hand it back to the family and say, here are the cremains of your loved one. So after the body is rendered down, Joe, is everything, including the bones and teeth, decimated? Yeah, yeah, it is, Jackie.

And that's one of the reasons that it will go through this augering process. There will be larger pieces that still remain, but they're very fragile. So the auger, after these cremains have passed through the oven, will go through the auger process and it will render them down even further to the point where they're powdered. And we're talking about things like bone. We're talking about things like teeth. So that enables the operator to actually take this dust, if you will, and it is dust. It's very, very fine. For folks at home that don't know or have a hard time conceptualizing this, literally, if you will, the next time you're around baby powder, talcum powder, just take some of that and render it out into your hand.

And cremains are generally just a tad bit more coarse than talcum powder. So, yeah, it reduces it all the way down. Is it white or gray white like we think of having, you know, ash from your fireplace? Generally, it's going to have some level of carbon in it. So, it will be more gray, if you will. And sometimes you can pick up on kind of darker elements that will appear black, but it's very particulate. The fire burns at such a high rate and for such a sustained period of time that most of the time, the elements that are left behind are going to have kind of a gray appearance.

It's not going to be white like talc or like snow. It will have kind of a gray appearance. It's not going to be white like talc or like snow. It will have kind of a gray appearance to them. So let's just say an average body, six feet, I don't know, 200 pounds. How long is that going to take? I mean, are we talking about days and days? I know you talked about it's obviously going to be different with a child as far as an adult, but just in general, about how long does it take per person? Because we have so many bodies here that were not cremated. I'm just trying to get an idea of if they had been, how much time would that have taken? Well, you can probably account, you know, you have to think about prep, you know, what has to go into this, taking the body down to the bare essence. Some of these

bodies will, in fact, have been autopsied, perhaps. And you may have had, and people don't realize this, you may have had bodies that had previously been embalmed in order to preserve them. So, you know, while families begin to try to think, you know, lots of times families can't make like a snap decision at the time of death. So sometimes bodies, funeral homes will go ahead and embalm bodies.

And then family will say, you know what? I think that we're going to go ahead and go down the cremation route. So with that said, every case is going to be variable. You begin to think about bone density, again, tissue thickness, all these sorts of things. But on average, it's going to take you roughly one to two hours in order to render the body completely down. Okay. What about metal in your body, fillings, implants, screws from accidents that have been repaired? You know, break your leg, you get a screw through it.

Yeah, yeah. What about metals like that? Yeah, and you'll still have things like pins that are put in from surgery. You know, some of these things are stainless steel, and there'll still be a remnant of that. Many times, the operators will go through through and they will pick out these items. And one of the things that actually is very interesting about this case, aside from how horrific it is, is that it has been stated by Ray Brent Marsh's attorney on a couple of occasions

that he and his father, who had previously operated this facility, the Tri-State Crematory, they had been exposed to fillings in teeth as they were being burned down. These fillings contained mercury. And so what can happen with the exposure to mercury is that you will have instances of this toxic effect on the brain and your ability to perceive things and judgment and all these sorts of things come into play. And, you know, the attorney has said on a couple of occasions that there were unhealthy levels of the substance in Ray Brenton Marsh's blood work over a period of time. But, you know, that rationale, that reasoning was not something that was considered by the court in this case.

At the risk of being morbid, more morbid than usual, Joe, what about the smell? Is there a smell or is it burning at such a high temperature that it burns that smell off? I mean, I'm just trying to think of people who work in the facility. What are they going to be exposed to? Yeah, well, the first thing you're going to be exposed to is the intense heat in this environment. And, you know, I've been in several crematories over the course of my career. And there's not necessarily an adverse smell when you when you walk in or anything like that because it's so contained. But you can, I think probably for me, even me as a death investigator, it's been around

thousands and thousands of dead bodies. There was something ominous to me when I would go in here. I remember one of the last times I ever went into a crematory, the oven had been off for probably three hours when I arrived. And I was going there to examine a body that was to be cremated. And Jackie, I got to tell you, the radiating heat from the oven itself absolutely just struck me in the face. It's one of those moments in time where, you know, we talk about being struck backwards by smell. We have something that's offensive that we smell. And that,

of course, has happened to me many times on cases involving severe decomposed bodies. But there was something about this environment when you go in there, that residual heat, you can feel it and it just kind of gets all over you. And it did for me. You know, it impacted me. And I never could get past that because, you know, I didn't go to crematories like weekly or anything like that. But I did visit them from time to time. The heat is what always got to me because, you know, I knew what was I knew about the process. I knew what was going on. And so you're in this environment and this radiating heat is kind of getting all over you at that moment in time.

And, you know, in at least in your mind, you're connecting, you're connecting these events together. You know, what has just transpired there. So, you know, in the case of tri tri-state crematory it was essentially a single person operation. I think that Ray Brent Marsh's mother helped administrate the facility, but he, he was the one that was solely responsible. By this time, his father, who was elderly, was already bedridden in sickness. So Marsh was operating this by himself.

He would take these bodies from the funeral home. And the way it would happen is that he had contracts with these funeral homes that would say, Hey, Mr. Marsh, we need to bring a body down to you and have it cremated. We need it back at this prescribed time. The family's expecting a range. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No problem. He would go retrieve it from maybe a funeral home or a hospital, take it to his crematory. And of course, he would feign having cremated the body. The next thing you know, he's got an urn that he returns to the funeral home. He doesn't give it directly to the family. He gives it to the funeral home.

So now you've involved these funeral homes in this process where the funeral home, unbeknownst to them, they're receiving these cremains. And then they're handing them off to the family, you know, and of course accepting the money for the process. And this would happen time and time again. Jackie, there is some indication that these cases that we're talking about, and I don't know that they've ever found all of the bodies, there's some indication that this may have been going on since, now hold on to your hat here, since the mid-90s perhaps, that these bodies have been accumulating since that period of time and one fact that we have to consider joe that these

families were given concrete dust most people are so unfamiliar with what they should be receiving from the funeral home that if they look in the urn, they're really not going to know the difference. No, they're not. That's not even on somebody's radar. I mean, who goes into a funeral home and actually thinks that they're having a wool pulled over their eyes when it comes to the remains of their loved one? I mean, just try to do the math on that just for a second. You're hearing the sound of my voice.

You know, who among us would actually think that you're being deceived by somebody that is being entrusted, arguably, with one of the most sacred, if you will, precious things that we have? And that's our loved ones, the remains of our loved ones. sacred, if you will, precious things that we have. And that's our loved ones, the remains of our loved ones. You know, for eons, you know, as humans, we've practiced honoring the dead. Just absorb that just for a second, honoring the dead. You know, the dead are essentially the most defenseless among us, if you will. The dead have no voice. And I'll tell you this, too.

You know, over the course of my career, I made in excess probably of 2,000 in-person death notifications. And one of the things that really has resonated with me over the years is that, you know, people that have illness, you know, sicknesses, they go through divorces, they have bad marriages, all these sorts of things. It's really hard to take the measure of anybody that's going through grief, how vulnerable you are. You're like a weak little child that needs care. And I'm talking about the families that remain. These people, these grieving families are literally the most vulnerable people at that moment in time in our society.

These grieving families are probably the easiest to be preyed upon. I remember sitting at my desk. I was still working for the medical examiner's office in Atlanta as a senior investigator. And I remember sitting at my desk when the news broke about this case. And at that point in time, when the news broke about tri-state crematory, we knew that there were a lot of bodies up in that area of Georgia that they had discovered. But I don't think that at that moment in time that I could even take the measure of it in my mind because this had never happened before. It had literally never happened. I don't know of any agency that had ever been faced with a set of circumstances like this.

You know, what do you do with 300 plus bodies that are suddenly thrust upon you in this tiny, tiny little county? You just made a major point, Joe, and you probably didn't even catch it yourself right then. You said 300 plus bodies. We should note that in total, 334 bodies were recovered. The bodies were being stored and piled in a storage shed, in vaults, and scattered inside and outside of the property. 334 bodies were recovered. How many weren't? That's a big question, isn't it, Jack?

You know, because when you're talking about essentially, and I mean this in the truest sense of the word, you know, you hear the term disintegration and people don't really give it much thought, but cremation probably comes closer to disintegration more so than anything else. When we begin to think about human bodies, you're literally disintegrating the body. You're pulling it apart. It's coming apart at a molecular level so that nothing is left. Imagine this, if a strong wind came by, it could blow cremains away. That gives you an idea. So how much more so when we begin to consider, you know, you had mentioned how many had been found at that moment in time and reflect back to what I'd said.

There was some indication this may have been going on since midnight. I don't know how many cases he was doing every single year. But you begin to do the math on this, and the numbers could potentially be astronomical. There may very well still be family members out there that have never given this a second thought. They didn't even know that they were attached in this way to this man's business. business, they may have that urn sitting up, you know, on the mantelpiece or in an honored spot in their home on a shelf somewhere, you know, where every day they walk by and they just assume that their loved one's body is in there. So, you know, when you begin to think about what happens to these bodies, you know, these bodies were actually laying out. Not all of them were in vaults, which we can get into.

But many of these bodies were actually laying out on the bare ground, on bare earth. And not just individually, singularly. There are some reports that these bodies were stacked. And I heard one description where an individual said, just bear with me here and try to wrap your mind around this. Stacked like cordwood. That is, when somebody says that, that's like the firewood that you've cut for the next year to go in, to burn over the year, that these bodies are stacked like cordwood just laying about and they're everywhere. They're absolutely everywhere over this huge piece of property. That's kind of got a wooden barrier to it, if you will, where you couldn't really see beyond the woods. It just happened that this lady was walking down the road with her dog and she happened to see the skull. Now there had allegedly been whispers in the air

for years and years that something was not quite right, that there were things going on around there, but no one had ever taken the time to go out and look. And it actually took a private citizen walking down the road to find the skull. And you asked this question, I think, how did the skull wind up in view that close to the road? Well, my default position on this is the following. It's the fact that there are scavengers coming onto that property, Jackie. You've got wild dogs, you've got coyotes, you've got any other kind of animals that will take remains and to them, their food, and they will drag remains all over. So, that's why I'm saying that logistically, it's a nightmare.

If you're out there trying to recover the remains and you're trying to account for everything that's out there, Lord only knows how many bodies had been drug off over the years. I bet probably folks in that area could still go out there and it would not surprise me the least bit in the adjacent wooded area that human remains would still be found to this day. So in a shed and scattered in and outside of the property and in the vaults, we know that bodies decay. Number one, would they have decayed inside the vault just as normal or are they sealed

since they're in a vacuum? Would that have made a difference? And what would the scene have looked like with all of these bodies? It's very basic. You know, you're going to have flies. You're going to have maggots. You're going to have a smell. I mean, and you're talking about a number of bodies that really it would have been hard to miss these kind of decompositional markers.

Yeah, I think so. You know, you begin to think about that. And the only thing I can really kind of hang my hat on here scientifically is that there would be a foul odor, but an average citizen that was going down the road might catch a whiff of that smell and they say, oh, well, I know where I am. I'm by the crematory. That's probably normal. I got to tell you, it ain't normal. All right. And yeah, the smell would have been affecting to a great degree.

You go in and you have these bodies that are in, you know, you had mentioned the vaults. And if folks aren't familiar with what a vault slash, some people will say crypt, some people will say vault. If you're ever going down the highway and you see a flatbed truck going down the road, it'll have these big concrete boxes on it many times. And you'll see this lid that's fit on top. Those are actually the vaults that are dropped into the ground at a dug grave. And remember, coffins are not just simply, you know, you just don't dig a hole and stick the coffin in the ground. They put a concrete vault in the ground and then lower the casket into the vault. And then a lid is placed on the vault.

Now this is not vacuum sealed in any way in Ray Brenton Marsh's case. He had several of these vaults that were around the property. I think they found four that I know of that the, and these things are big. I mean, they're, they're, you know, from a three dimensional standpoint, you know, you look at one of these things, it's probably, I don't know, probably four feet wide. It's over six feet in length. And it's probably, I don't know, maybe four feet deep. Um, you take this thing and you can just kind of compress bodies into this thing. And it works much like you might think of mulching in your yard.

You know, people mulch decaying vegetable matter. You begin to stack these bodies on top of one another in there. And there's heat. Remember, we're talking about the deep south and it didn't have to be the deep south. You could have done this up north as well. It still gets hot up there too. And then you put the lid on top of it. That increases kind of the level of heat that's contained in there because

you've got this, you've got this process that's going on in decomposition where it's kind of generating its own heat and it impacts everything else around it. So at the end of the day, when you take the lids off of these vaults, and this is quite amazing when you think of it, you take the lids off these vaults, the bodies on top that were last laying in there, you might could still recognize that that's a body. But as you go deeper, as you go deeper, now you're getting into essentially what becomes a stew. It's actually a stew. This is almost like a slow cooking process where

everything is beginning to render down and drop down and drop down. We have a term for this in forensic anthropology that these practitioners refer to. It's called stratification, where, you know, when remains are buried and, you know, from a geological standpoint, you can see stratification where things are laid on top of things and things become stratified. There's different layers to them. And here, you've got an intense example of that. Now, what happens is that as a result of these bodies being stratified, they begin to come apart.

And as they come apart, remember, we don't have any soft tissue in place any longer that are holding that's holding skeleton together. Now you've just got this kind of really disgusting soup that's at the bottom and the remains begin to co-mingle. So you'll have skeletal remains that over a period of time, you can't really appreciate it in the short period, but over a period of time, they actually begin to roll a little bit in there. They'll adjust, particularly in this kind of thick, viscous fluid that's down at the bottom. And you have this co-mingling of remains. So you have all of these skeletons that are mixed together.

So when you look at it, you can just, you know, just from that, you know, the human body's got over 200 bones in it. So if you've got 15 bodies that are stacked on top of, you know, one another in there, do the math, Do the math. Get an idea as to what you're talking about relative to all of the skeletal elements that are commingling with one another. How do you go about kind of separating all this? That's what made this such an overwhelming task for all of the people at the scene. Joe, we know that it was an anonymous tip that brought police into this investigation. How would they have linked that skull back to the crematory? The only answer I really have for that, Jackie, is proximity. You know, you put two and two together because, you know, the authorities, the people that lived in this area, in this little isolated rural area of Georgia, people know that travel

up and down that road that live in proximity to this location, certainly the authorities I'm sure probably know that the crematory is there. So you find a skull lying on the ground, you're going to put these two factors together. You don't have to be an investigator to do that. Your point of origin is going to be within a stone's throw of that skull. And then when you get investigators out there, they're going to know or at least have a rudimentary understanding regarding human remains and how far, say, for instance, a scavenger will go with a bit of human remain. You know, they're not going to go a long, long ways away. So if you think about that skull, the remainder of that body probably would, you know, be within 50 yards of that point at which you found the skull, unless,

unless there'd been some kind of huge rainstorm and the body had been completely disarticulated and things get washed away. But that's, that's an anomaly that normally doesn't happen. And in this particular case, when they found that skull, all they had to do is think, well, my gosh, just through that woodlawn is a crematory. I think that we can probably begin our investigation there. And I'm sure that when they rolled up, they began to ask questions. And all of a sudden, can you imagine being that investigator? You look out and maybe you see a foot, maybe you see a hand, maybe you see an entire intact body. And suddenly you realize what you're in the middle of.

And it was an absolute hellscape. So far, Joe, 226 of the 334 bodies that were recovered have been identified. So at this point, you're looking at DNA. They obviously would go to their families and say, we found this body part. Did you contract with the crematory for services? Is that how it was working to identify those bodies? Yeah, the GBI, which the GBI is the primary investigative body within the state of Georgia. They're the state police.

You know, you've got state troopers that handle, you know, highway things that go on like that. And then you have the GBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. And they're the ones that took the lead on this case from this perspective of trying to piece all this together. And, of course, at this point in time, this is what's kind of odd about this case and kind of sets it apart, you know, different than things that maybe I talk about regularly on body bags. This case, when you begin to bore down into it, you're not talking about a homicide. Now, some of these bodies, I don't know, some of these people could have been victims of homicide at some point in time, but they wound up with a funeral home.

Okay. I'm not saying that none of these bodies were the victim of a homicide before they got to the funeral home. That, you know, that that is probably the case. However, in this particular case, as it centers around Marsh and the tri-state crematory, you're not talking about a true death investigation. Now, the mission here is to try to get the bodies identified. We're not we're not thinking about like we normally do in medical legal terms, cause and manner of death, which I talk a lot about on Body Bags. This is an identification effort at this point in time. So, you're relying upon things like dental x-rays.

If any of the bodies are visually identifiable, I'm sure that they took facial photographs of many of these bodies, the ones that could still be recognizable, any kind of jewelry that they may have had. And this is kind of a curious thing. I know that some of the bodies that, and this is kind of, this is really particularly ghastly.

Some of these bodies that were out there were actually identified by hospital bracelets that they had on the wrist. And let me break this down to you. When somebody dies in a hospital, they still have their patient ID on their wrist. The body is removed from the room and it goes to perhaps the hospital morgue or they might just, if they don't have a morgue, they have what's called a cool room. And then you wait for the service to come and pick up the body. This is how little care this person took, all right? He would load the body into the back of the hearse, drive it to the crematory out on the property and then can you imagine? He just drags the body out of the back of the

hearse and discards it out on the open ground. Maybe still wearing, and I do know this for a fact, there were some bodies that were out there that still had hospital gowns on. And they still had identity, those plastic identity bracelets around their wrists. I even know of a case where they found, and this is particularly horrible, found the body of an infant commingled with adult bodies. Can you imagine that? Just laying there, and around the little ankle of the baby,

there was a hospital identifier. I've walked into homes where entire families have been slaughtered in one evening. And yeah, I felt like I had the weight of the world on me as an investigator, because there were so, there was so much evidence at the scene that I had to consider. I had to examine all of these bodies. I had to actually contextualize everything. I don't, for me, I cannot even imagine what it would take in order to begin on a case like

this. what it would take in order to begin on a case like this when you look out over this piece of property and you cannot turn your head to the left or the right without seeing a corpse. Let's talk a little bit about the people who would have handled this kind of assignment. What type of investigators were sent? I do know this was a federal investigation because it was across state lines. So what kind of personnel would have been deployed to handle this situation? Let's go back in time just a little bit. And remember, we're talking about February of 2002.

You know, in September of 2001, just a couple of months before the Twin Towers had come down. As a matter of fact, at this point in time, in February of 2002, they still had not completely finished processing all of the bodies. It would still be several months after that. And up in New York, when this occurred, it triggered an organization within the federal government that's called DMORT. Many people have never heard of this organization, but it's kind of interesting, particularly from a medical legal standpoint. But DMORT is an acronym that actually stands for Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams. And these teams are made up of medical legal death investigators, forensic pathologists, X-ray technicians, mortuary service personnel, dentists.

Many people across the spectrum in medical legal death investigation, their sole purpose is to go out in mass fatality events and begin to piece together what had happened and try to identify bodies. You know, Jackie, some of the people that were out at the scene had just returned from ground zero. And can you imagine the horror that they had witnessed up there? And then they come down to Georgia. And before their very eyes, here is something that is obviously not at the level of ground zero, but still horrific to look at. So when the switch is flipped for these people to respond, it's only going to happen. And actually, the state medical examiner requested assistance with this.

It's only going to happen if you have such a volume of bodies that it outpaces the resources of the state. They don't have any way to handle this. So it would have been where these individuals would have gone out in teams. They would have broken them down into teams. They would have searched a grid. They would have done a grid search over the entire area and began to try to put this thing together so that they can come up with identifications for everybody. And it's at this point in time that you would have people like mortuary services people

that would begin to coordinate with all of these contracted funeral homes around the area to try to track down how many bodies had been sent to tri-state crematory from the various funeral homes. Can you imagine what a nightmare would be, say, for instance, if a funeral home was now closed that may have been open 10 years earlier, the trail suddenly goes cold for you at that point in time. And you're left scratching their head because it's completely different than a normal investigation where we have an unidentified body, you know, where the coroner is going out there, the medical examiner is going out there, and we're kind of the first on the scene. At this point in time, the body, these bodies that you have before you have already passed through several hands at this point.

So you're having to backtrack on everything. And then when you put this factor in there, this huge number of bodies, it increases exponentially as far as the amount of labor that it takes to try to solve these cases. How long would it take to complete an investigation like this with the number of bodies that were recovered and with the size of the area that had to be investigated? It'd be daunting to say the very least. A lot of it's going to be dependent upon what the level of decay is with a particular body or how intact the body still is that you're, you know, you have to focus one body at a time. And so, you know, you're looking at a

body that may, for instance, be in an advanced state of decomposition. You might only have skeletal remains that are left. You might only have a partial skeleton what are you going to do if say from the pelvis down that's all that remains the upper torso the arms small small bones of the hand the ribs the vertebra are scattered about and the skull is missing say for instance like the skull they found out by the road um you know and so it comes in degrees and they would have in the way this is organized, the scene would have been sectioned off when it comes to the processing area. The processing area is completely separate, say, for instance, from the crime scene itself or the scenes where these bodies are found. They're going to have an area that's set up over there that they've got portable X-ray. They've got portable autopsy services that are there. They've got a separate records area. They've actually got, believe it

or not, they've actually got dental stations over there so that they would take a skull, for instance, and there would be a forensic odontologist or dentist standing there with their tools, looking at teeth very, very carefully and making annotations about everything that's going on orally with the body to see if there's any restorations, amalgams, missing teeth. If the person had some kind of, say, for instance, had evidence of a root canal or if they had evidence of, say, a bridge that was in place or dentures, for instance. They would look at everything to try to gather as much information as they could about that one remain and begin to piece this together. And you try to essentially breathe life into the dead at this point in time to tell their

history. And everything is important. You know, old surgery scars, or perhaps if all you have are skeletal remains, you mentioned earlier, the rendering down of bodies that might have pins that have been in place, say in bones, for instance, as a result of some kind of orthopedic surgery. That's going to be essential information at this point in time. So every bit of information and data that you can come across relative to these bodies is going to be essential if you want to bring this thing to an end. So again, Joe, we know that over 100 bodies were not identified. What happens now? You know, if our listeners wish to, they can still go to the GBI website. And there is a section. And this gives you this. This gives you an idea. It's exactly, I think we're two weeks past it, but the 20-year anniversary just happened relative to Tri-State.

To give you an idea of how seriously the GBI takes this, they have an entire webpage on their website that is devoted to strictly the tri-state crematory case. And anybody that wants to can go through there and look at the list of the remains that still to this day remain unidentified. And again, this is something that is almost counterintuitive to the way we normally conduct investigations. Because if we come across, just so our listeners can grasp this, if we come across a body, an individual body that we're working a case on, and we try very, very diligently to get that person identified, we are looking specifically for a family.

Jackie, everybody that's out there had at some point in time been previously accounted for. It had already been identified at some point in time in the history of those remains. The problem is, is that the families are no longer aware of it. They just assumed that their loved one was cremated and they've moved on with their life at this point in time. So I don't know how much success that there will be in trying to get the remainder of these bodies, which there are quite a number of. At the end of the day, how much success they will have in getting these remains identified. As you were talking, Joe, I did what you said. I went to the GBI website and that is GBI.Georgia.gov forward slash try TRI dash state.

Dash crematory dash UID GBI.georgia.gov slash tri-state-crematory-uid. I would suggest that anybody that is from the tri-state area, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, that may have suffered a loss in their family and their family member had been cremated. I would suggest at least take a look. Just take a look and see what is on that list, because you never know. You might be the answer to one of these big questions that remains, and that is who, in fact, are these individuals? Because as time has gone on, people have forgotten about this case. And, you know, reflectively, we look back at it and it is a case that is going to live with everybody, I think, that was out at that scene. It still impacts them to this day.

And that community up there will never, ever be the same. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.